Television (TV) broadcast content may be divided into a TV program section and an advertisement section. Generally, an advertisement section is recognized as a section having low importance or as an unnecessary section from the standpoint of viewers, so that research into technology for automatically detecting such an advertisement section and eliminating the detected advertisement section or reprocessing the detected advertisement section in another form, and then providing the TV content to users has been widely conducted.
Meanwhile, the necessity to run a related business for TV advertisements or to continuously monitor the advertisements of competitors is also present. Therefore, if a program section and an advertisement section can be automatically distinguished from each other regardless of whether the program section or the advertisement section is important, great convenience may be provided.
However, distinguishing between a program section and an advertisement section in broadcast content was manually performed by a person in most cases in the past, and research into technology for automatically distinguishing between a program section and an advertisement section has been conducted, but there is the limitation that efficiency is still very low.
Conventional known methods of detecting an advertisement section include, for example, a method of detecting an advertisement section by detecting black frames because there are many cases where black frames are inserted into start and end time points of advertisements.
Alternatively, as described in the following Prior Art Document 2, a method of utilizing a principle by which audio signals are not present at time points at which advertisements are changed is also known.
Further, a method of utilizing a principle by which the lengths of advertisements are as uniform as 15 seconds or 30 seconds, or a principle by which the same advertisement repeatedly appears in a broadcast, or a method of detecting a broadcast logo continuously appearing in a TV program section, has also been used, and various methods mentioned above have also been combined to detect an advertisement section.
However, since there are many cases where the signal characteristics of advertisement sections are different for respective countries and broadcasting channels, it is difficult to solve all differences using the above-mentioned conventional methods. For example, in the U.S., there are many cases where black frames are inserted into the start and end positions of advertisements, but this is not the case in other countries.
Further, existing advertisements are arranged into a database (DB) which may be occasionally used to detect an advertisement section, but there is a limitation in that it is very difficult to previously construct a DB storing all advertisements.
Meanwhile, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 10-2011-0129325 (Date of Publication: Dec. 1, 2011) relates to an “Advertisement image detection method and apparatus” and discloses an advertisement image detection method including the step of partitioning each of a plurality of frames of a monitoring target image, in which broadcast content and an advertisement image played by a video play device are mixed, into sub-blocks having a predetermined size; the step of calculating pieces of feature information of respective sub-blocks corresponding to preset locations among the sub-blocks having the predetermined size; the step of converting the pieces of feature information into feature information vectors; and the step of comparing the feature information vectors with the feature information vectors of a reference advertisement image desired to be detected and previously stored in a DB and detecting the reference advertisement image.
However, this technology has a limitation in that pieces of feature information about advertisement images must be previously and accurately stored, and the technology can be applied only to a case where the pieces of feature information of a monitoring target image and an advertisement image are completely identical to each other, and cannot be applied to a case where advertisement sections are only partially identical. Furthermore, this technology is fundamentally limited in that a DB is fixed and then the DB cannot be dynamically updated with the lapse of time.